Trends are a bit of a guesswork, and by nature we should be using these trends to inspire our creativity and push boundaries. They’re great for understanding the current design culture: what we love, what we hate and what we’re trying to achieve and move towards. As ever, design should be user-centred so understanding trends and emphasising with them are important in achieving this. Design trends should always be used thoughtfully and appropriately, as opposed to being used for the sake of following a trend.

With that all in mind, here’s some exciting and innovative trends from designers pushing the boundaries of Website design in 2019:

Bold and unique typography

Using bold, maxi typography a la Brutalism (read more in my Graphic design trends for 2019), is set to become more and more embraced within website design. Designers are using it to create strong visual identities and it’s becoming more actively involved within the design. Combination of different font weights and density values, combinations between vertical, diagonal, and horizontal orientation, and even messy typography looks will be the norm in 2019. Outline typography is set to become more popular, too.

Art and illustrations

Art and illustrations were increasingly used throughout the end of 2018 to establish a strong identity and point of difference for brands. Mailchimp had a large rebrand towards the end of last year and particularly embraced the use of hand-drawn illustrations and visuals:

Alternative art: strokes, doodles and annotations

Annotations and doodles are a great, creative way to help a good user-experience and add feedback to a design. I used it for a website that will be launching early 2019 and I loved how it allows you to be creative with elements that are traditional and not often experimented with, such as add a circle doodle to a button instead of a border.

Gradients

This is one of those trends that I used to struggle getting on board with, but there’s some amazing examples of using gradients as a throwback to the nineties clipart days. See examples of current sites adopting the use of gradients from Spotify, Stripe and Apple:

You can use the following online tools to help you create the perfect gradient tools: